1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to mobile communication terminal devices capable of displaying text such as contents and E-mails obtained through data communication with an external server via a digital network, and more specifically, to a portable terminal device for mobile communication such as a cellular phone and a personal digital assistant.
2. Description of the Background Art
The use of the Internet has been widely and rapidly spread all over the world in recent years. Various contents are stored in servers on the World Wide Web (such servers are hereinafter referred to as WWW servers). The contents including text and images are created in description language typified by HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Creators use a desired character set to create text, and may paste an image onto the created text using reserved words of the description language in use. The size of the image and its pasting position are also specified by the reserved words as desired.
Conventionally, most users browse the contents using personal computers (PCs) on which a WWW browser is installed. The WWW browser analyzes the contents obtained from the WWW servers. Then, the WWW browser determines how the contents should be displayed on a display of the PC by referring to the character sets and image display forms that the user has set in advance.
To set the character set on the WWW browser, the user first makes the display device display a window for setting the character set, and then selects one of a plurality of character sets such as JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC supported by the WWW browser in use. Also to set the image display form, the user first makes the display device display a window for setting the image display form, and then selects one of a plurality of display forms of images included in the contents (typically, displaying or not displaying of the images).
Conventionally, mobile communication has been often achieved by using a mobile communication terminal device only as a communication device, and a notebook PC. In recent years, however, by installing the WWW browser in the terminal itself, the user can browse the contents stored in the WWW servers only using the terminal.
Like the WWW browser for PCs, the WWW browser installed in the terminals also analyzes the contents obtained from the WWW servers, and by referring to predetermined character sets and display modes, the browser determines how the contents should be displayed on a display of the terminal.
However, hardware performance of terminals is lower than that of PCs due to its size. Here, assume that the character set is set on the WWW browser of the terminal through the following procedure: “display a list of a plurality of character sets” “select a character set”. Alternatively, the user may select “auto selection” for automatically selecting the character set. This auto selection, however, puts an enormous load on the CPU in the terminal. In addition, operating a small input device of the terminal might be burdensome to users.
Oftentimes, since users have an understanding of character sets, many PC users can select and set the correct character set according to the above setting procedure to browse the contents when the characters (text) on the displayed screen appear garbled. The “garble” state occurs when the character set to be used in the application software, typically a WWW browser, does not coincide with the character set originally used in text data. In the “garble” state, the terminal cannot decode the character set used in the original text, and, as a result, erroneous data is displayed on the screen of the terminal.
However, more users of the terminals probably do not understand even the system of character sets. Therefore, it is too demanding to make such users select and set the correct character set while viewing the garbled contents.
Under these backgrounds, a user interface in the portable terminal has to be able to set the character set more easily in the portable terminal. The same goes for the image display form.
Further, the terminal can also display an electronic mail (E-mail) received from a mail server by executing a mailer installed in the terminal. The E-mail is constructed of text (HTML, plain text, or the like).
As described above, users are having a growing number of opportunities to deal with text and/or images through the terminal. Therefore, the user interfaces capable of setting the character set and/or image display form more easily are required.